Хронотоп сельских картинок в «Легком дыхании»: Бунин – Жемчужников – Пушкин

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the chronotope of Bunin’s story “Light Breathing” in connection with Bunin’s cosmogonic conceptual system, which includes ideas about the opposite processes of destruction and regeneration of the world, about breaking the whole into parts and simultaneous collecting the whole from the parts, where the parts are identical, a part is equal to the whole and vice versa. Similar relationships exist between space and time as two components of the chronotope, as well as between languages in a multilingual code, which Bunin used to expand the possibilities of textual deployment of the system. Two cycles of poems by A.M. Zhemchuzhnikov with the same names “Rural pictures and impressions” and the poem “Winter Morning” by A.S. Pushkin play an important role in the formation of the chronotope of the story. The intertext does not act as a collection of disparate references to the texts of predecessors, but represents a systematic formation. The use of the noted pretexts is not accidental: it is built into the Faustian code that connects the ideas about Faust and Fasts and is used by Bunin for the textual deployment of his cosmogonic-eschatological system. The temporal and spatial components of the chronotope as a whole undergo metamorphoses, which reveal the commonality of spatial and temporal characteristics. The space in the story is divided into urban and suburban (countryside); the latter includes the cemetery and the village. The spatial component of the chronotope is characterized by constant circular movements between them. A variety of textual and non-textual techniques contribute to the close identification of these loci, as well as more fractional loci of Olya Meshcherskaya’s rural walk. In a similar way, the circular movement of the annual year is combined with the emphasis on individual events of the story (summer events described in Olya Meshcherskaya’s diary entry, Olya’s conversation with the primary gymnasium, class lady at Olya’s grave). Each of them is identical to all the others and, consequently, to the whole year. The chronotope includes the city of Yelets, unnamed in the story, whose status in Bunin’s conceptual system simultaneously covers both urban and rural loci, and these loci themselves show a tendency to move into the world dimension.